The Inside Edge, page 14
A month ago he’d have snarked at her. Today, though, he just agreed. “The usual.”
Greg poked his head out of the locker room, one skate bag slung over each shoulder, and Aubrey realized he was holding him up. “Look, Mom, we’re obviously not going to solve our multiple issues in one phone call, but I’m willing to work on them if you are.”
“That….” For the first time he could remember, his mom’s voice grew tight, almost to breaking. “That would be really nice. I’d like that.”
Aubrey found himself blinking back tears of his own. “Okay. Well. Then let’s keep the lines of communication open, yeah? Meanwhile I’ve got to go, because I’m being terribly rude to a friend who needs to celebrate a successful audition.”
“All right. I love you, sweetheart. I’m glad you called.”
“Yeah,” Aubrey agreed, his throat too thick to squeeze out what he wanted to say. “Me too.”
He pulled his phone from his ear as Greg handed over his bag. “Hey. Sorry about interrupting.”
“No, no, it’s fine. I’ve done enough character development for one day.”
“Good. Because I just lined up a job for you, so I think you owe me a drink.”
“It’s not even noon on a Wednesday.” Aubrey was no stranger to a champagne brunch, but he was thirty now. He saved that stuff for weekends. “How about we start with lunch?”
THE RESTAURANT they chose was quiet. Aubrey figured half the city was knocking off work early for the holiday, rather than going out to lunch. That suited him fine. The longer he spent away from his apartment building, the more likely he could forget what was happening with Nate and how much it was great and sucked at the same time.
Greg let him off the hook until he’d eaten half his weight in fish tacos. Then he said, “So, you’re sleeping with Nate. That’s an exciting new level of stupidity and reckless disregard for your emotional health.”
Aubrey looked forlornly at the last half of a fish taco, but no, the moment was gone. “Yeah, well. The second time was an accident, sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“I went to a bar to pick up. He went to the same bar to pick up. We just… went home together.”
“Uh-huh.” Greg sipped his mimosa. “And the third time?”
“Yeah, the third time was the problem.” He blew out a breath. “So you know how the heat in my apartment building went out a couple nights ago? We’d just gotten back from Tampa after a day of flight delays. Nate offered to let me crash with him. I was too weak to say no. The next morning, one thing led to another….”
“Say no more.” Greg stole one of Aubrey’s fries.
“Oh, I’d love if the story stopped there, believe me.”
“Wait, the stupidity extends past sleepy domestic morning sex?” Greg gave up the pretense that he wasn’t going to consume the rest of Aubrey’s fries and pulled the whole plate toward himself.
Aubrey felt a headache coming on. He closed his eyes and rubbed at the bridge of his nose, only half so he didn’t have to look at Greg while he said, “I got up and took a shower, and while I was looking for a towel, Nate’s parents showed up.”
Greg inhaled on a fry and spent a few seconds coughing into a napkin. He reached for his water glass and took a deep gulp. Then he managed, “That was awkward, I assume.”
“Not as awkward as the fist-bump she gave Nate after.”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah.”
“So that’s it? You made a bad decision—three bad decisions—and then your crush’s mom saw you naked?” He dunked a fry in ketchup.
Aubrey knocked back the rest of his beer. “No. Then Nate asked me to pretend to be his boyfriend so his parents wouldn’t think he was having a midlife crisis.”
Greg stared at him, speechless.
Aubrey didn’t have much to say for himself either, but the buzz of his phone with an incoming text saved him yet again.
Well, sort of.
He looked at the screen and groaned.
“What?”
“It’s Nate,” he said. “He needs me to pick up butter and sage for Thanksgiving dinner.”
Chapter Fifteen
NATE HAD made one major miscalculation about Thanksgiving dinner: how long it would take one person to prepare it.
His mom had always done everything when he was growing up. Now he wanted her to be able to relax, enjoy the sights in Chicago, and come back to a nice dinner. But at this rate, the dinner he’d scheduled for five was going to be more like eight.
Fortunately Aubrey picked up on the first ring.
“Please don’t tell me you need me to go to the grocery store.”
“I don’t need you to go to the grocery store,” Nate said obediently. Then something occurred to him. “Although… you don’t happen to have any wine?”
He could practically hear Aubrey’s eye roll. “Red, white, rosé, or sparkling?”
Yeah, that was a stupid question. “Yes,” Nate answered. “Actually, are you busy?”
“I’m watching the 2019 World Championships in my underwear and eating cereal out of the box.”
Now there was an image. “What kind of cereal?”
“Corn Pops.”
“Nice. Good choice.”
Aubrey crunched on some Corn Pops. “So, what’s up?”
Clearing his throat, Nate surveyed the carnage of his kitchen. A bag of unpeeled potatoes. A similar mound of yams. Unstemmed green beans. A can of pumpkin filling, a bag of flour, powdered sugar, mace and cloves. He’d managed to get the stuffed turkey in the oven, but that was it. Time to swallow his pride. “I kind of need a sous chef.”
“Oh?” The laugh in his voice was obvious. “Parents can’t be trusted in the kitchen?”
“I kicked them out to go sightseeing and enjoy their holiday, but I think I bit off more than I can chew. Or will be able to chew. No chewing will be happening for a long time unless I get some help, is what I’m saying.”
“Mm-hmm,” Aubrey said, crunching a little more.
He was really going to make Nate ask. Fine. “If you’re not too busy, would you mind putting on some pants and helping me out?”
Aubrey let himself in ten minutes later, in a purple T-shirt and sweatpants that said PINK in glitter across the ass. He’d brought his own apron too—a black one with a giant sausage and the legend Size Matters.
“Classy,” Nate said.
“Beggars and choosers, Nate.” Aubrey plunked two bottles of wine on the counter and cracked one open.
Nate coughed. “Feeling a little parched after those Corn Pops?”
“I love cooking with wine,” Aubrey said seriously, taking down a pair of glasses. “Sometimes I even put it in the food.” He poured and then handed Nate a glass. “Cheers. Now, what do you need me to do?”
Nate held up a potato peeler and the can of pumpkin. “Choose your weapon.”
Aubrey selected the peeler—wise choice—and Nate turned on the radio to play in the background as he flicked through his tablet for directions on how to make a pumpkin pie.
“I always preferred apple.” Aubrey had amassed a pile of potato peels the size of a dinner plate.
“What!” Nate turned so sharply he got sugar all over the counter. Oh well, the kitchen was a total loss anyway. “Shit. That seems like the sort of thing a boyfriend should know.”
Aubrey’s brows furrowed. “Yeah, but they probably find out at their first joint Thanksgiving. I don’t think our cover’s blown.”
True, but it didn’t make Nate feel any better. Actually he felt kind of… ill. Maybe he should’ve eaten lunch. He dusted his hand off on his pants and grabbed his phone to send a quick text.
“Hey.” Aubrey bumped Nate’s arm, still frowning. “Look, it’s fine. It’s not like this would’ve come up in casual conversation. We can always say we were too busy having sex to talk pie.”
Jesus. Nate laughed despite himself. “Stop trying to make me feel better, please.”
“Is it working?”
“No comment.”
Aubrey grinned.
With the two of them working and the oven on, it didn’t take long for the kitchen to heat up. Nate ditched his sweater over one of the breakfast-bar stools before he mixed together the pie filling.
“Exactly how many potatoes do you think four people can eat?” Aubrey asked finally, reaching for one of the final spuds. Then: “It is just the four of us, right? You aren’t springing more surprise family members on me?”
Nate eyed the pile. What was the rule? Two per person, two for the pot? So ten potatoes? Aubrey had peeled fourteen. “What? No, Emily and her husband brought the baby to visit his family in Vancouver. It’s just the four of us.” He paused and did some calculations. Even in his prime hockey days, he’d have had trouble putting away more than two potatoes that size. Oops. “You can probably stop now.”
“Oh, you think?” Aubrey laughed. “You’re gonna be making potato pancakes for a week.”
Nate’s stomach growled. “I can live with that.”
With the pie done, Nate turned his attention to the green beans, stemming away next to Aubrey at the counter while Aubrey hummed along with eighties dance pop. “So this is your first time making Thanksgiving dinner, eh?”
“Was it the potatoes that gave me away?”
“The fact that you didn’t realize how much help you were going to need, honestly.”
Nate shrugged and tossed another handful of beans into the colander. “Mom always insisted on doing Thanksgiving dinner, just her and Dad. Though now that I think about it, she started the day before with the prep work and the baking. She used to say my sister and I got underfoot. Marty….”
Aubrey bumped his hip. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“No, it’s fine. He was just kind of a control freak in the kitchen. He’s a professionally trained chef.”
“Ah.” Aubrey put down the last sweet potato. “That’ll do it.”
“He didn’t even work in a restaurant anymore when we met—he owned a catering company.” Nate had felt judged every time he so much as reheated leftovers. Which was maybe Nate’s problem as much as Marty’s, in retrospect.
But this Nate liked. Aubrey was easy to work around, maybe because they were used to working together in a different context, maybe because Aubrey was also a professional athlete. Maybe because they were sleeping together.
“Can I ask you something?” Aubrey swept the pile of peelings into the compost bin. “What happened? I mean, you must’ve been happy at one point, or else why get married? But…. Shit, that’s really personal. Sorry.”
“It’s nothing I haven’t asked myself.” Not that he’d come up with a satisfactory response. He swirled the remaining wine in his glass for a moment to give himself time to think. Then he picked up a dishtowel to clean up the sugar he’d spilled on the counter. “Honestly, I think what happened is… I retired.”
Marty might have cheated on him before that, but Nate mostly wasn’t around to notice then, and he didn’t want to talk about the cheating with Aubrey. They were having a nice time. He didn’t need to go there.
Aubrey leaned back against the counter, hip cocked, his half-empty glass held at his side. “And suddenly you were spending too much time together, or…?”
“No. I know I make it sound terrible, but we actually got along fine.”
“I mean, you agreed on that travesty of a vase, so….”
Nate swatted him on the thigh with the dishtowel. “You’re hilarious. I think the problem actually was we had different ideas of what my retirement would be like. Maybe we just didn’t talk about it enough, or maybe we weren’t listening. I mean, we had other problems too, but that’s the one that broke us. I thought, okay, retirement, time to start a family. Maybe I’d do some work with the team, but otherwise I’d be home a lot. Only it turns out the whole time, Marty had just been waiting until I hung them up to spring this idea that he wanted to sell the catering company and open a bed-and-breakfast.”
Aubrey winced. “Ah. I can see how that would go over poorly.”
Nate tossed the dishtowel in the general direction of the laundry room. “Yeah. I was used to having people up in my business in my professional life, but that’s different when you literally live where you work. We talked about different things we could try, but ultimately he wasn’t any more willing to compromise his dream than I was mine, so we called it quits.”
“Sorry. That sucks.”
Nate shrugged. “It is what it is. The truth is, we’re both better off. He’s living out his B and B dream with his new fiancé, and I….”
I have you.
Oh shit.
Whatever was between them felt less like sexual convenience and fake dating all the time. Nate had made himself believe he didn’t want another relationship, wasn’t ready to fall in love again.
Then he’d gone and done it anyway, and he’d put himself into a position where he couldn’t tell Aubrey about it.
“I’m happy for him,” Nate stumbled to cover. “It’s not like my biological clock is ticking. I have time to figure out what I want.” Which is great, because it’s apparently right in front of me and I didn’t notice, and now I’m fake dating it. “It turns out I wasn’t really completely ready to retire anyway.”
Aubrey was giving him a calculating look, but he didn’t overtly call bullshit. “You don’t exactly strike me as the type to take well to sitting around doing nothing.”
“Spoken like someone without a six-month-old niece.”
Aubrey made a face. “You know what I mean. Going from working and traveling October through June to stay-at-home husband and dad is a pretty big shift.”
“Yeah,” Nate conceded, because Aubrey was right, even if Nate suspected that the B and B plan would have involved a lot of work for him in some capacity—landscaping or cleaning or greeting guests. Maybe giving horseback tours. Marty had always wanted to keep a stable.
“Anyway.” Aubrey plunked his wineglass down on the counter with emphasis. “We should eat something, because that turkey is starting to smell incredible, and my stomach is telling me that the Corn Pops were not a sufficient base to layer wine on top of. And then we should make a plan to deal with all of that.” He gestured to indicate the cornucopia of vegetables on the counter. “Because we still have work to do.”
“I see your point.” Nate’s stomach growled again. “Let’s see what I can come up with.”
In the end they resorted to breaking into the charcuterie board Nate had ordered as an appetizer, because neither of them felt like fast food or freezer meals.
“Oh my God, this mustard,” Aubrey enthused as he spread a thick layer on a baguette and topped it with a chunk of cured pork.
“We could just eat all this and skip dinner.” Nate eyed the platter, then chose a delicate pickle to pair with his manchego.
“Fuck you. I didn’t peel every potato on earth for nothing.” Aubrey snagged the last pickle. Oops. Nate had meant to save some of those for his parents. Oh well; if they ate all of them, his parents would never know they’d missed out. “Besides, potato pancakes.”
“You’re very fixated on the pancakes.”
Aubrey shook the pickle at him and then popped it in his mouth. “I’m goal-oriented.”
Nate’s ears warmed. He was very aware of how goal-oriented Aubrey could be. “Yeah, I know.”
Their eyes met across the table, and he could tell Aubrey knew exactly what he was thinking—and that Aubrey was thinking it too. Nate’s parents probably wouldn’t be home for another hour and a half. And they already knew Nate and Aubrey were sleeping together.
Nate licked his lips. They’d finished the bottle of wine, and now he was feeling a little parched. Should they open the other bottle of wine? Or just—fall into bed again and—no, that was a bad idea. Nate needed to process his emotions instead of his biological urges—
The timer dinged.
“Shit. I’m supposed to baste the turkey.”
The corner of Aubrey’s mouth quirked up. “No comment.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“Your mom thinks so.”
Nate rolled his eyes and went to attend to the bird.
They never did open the second bottle.
With Aubrey’s help, he managed to get everything ready for a respectable five thirty mealtime. At quarter to five, Aubrey slipped upstairs to shower and change just as Nate’s parents came in, pink-cheeked and laughing. Nate had just enough sense to be glad Aubrey had thrown his apron in Nate’s laundry pile. His mom didn’t need an excuse to make any more embarrassing insinuations, no matter how warranted.
AUBREY SHOWERED and shaved and spent the time it took to dry his hair considering his wardrobe for the most appropriate first-Thanksgiving-with-boyfriend’s-parents outfit. It was stupid, and it wouldn’t really matter what he wore, but if he wore a comfortable sweatshirt with holes in it, at least he’d be wearing a physical reminder of the truth. But he wouldn’t disrespect Nate’s parents like that, and even Nate didn’t really deserve it. He didn’t know he’d hurt Aubrey by asking him to play-act a scenario he longed to be real.
So he chose nicely tailored jeans and a button-down shirt in a deep iridescent blue and packed a few more bottles of wine in a cloth bag to bring downstairs. “Just in case,” he said at the door as he nearly ran into Nate, who stepped aside to let him in.
“I see you were concerned about the dangers of holiday sobriety,” Nate’s dad said dryly.
No, I just thought a little social lubrication might help me get through this with my heart only somewhat bruised. Aubrey smiled gamely and handed him the bag so he could take his shoes off. “I need a glass or two to forget it’s not October.”
He was about to ask if Nate needed help setting the table, but then he realized Nate was still waiting by the door. Before he could ask why, the elevator arrived and a young woman stepped out with a small white box. She saw Nate peering out the door and smiled. “Nate Overton?”
“Thank you so much for delivering last minute.” Nate smiled and took the box.
